Right Ho, Jeeves

Bertram Wooster

Bertie drifts through country-house weekends and London clubs with impeccable tailoring and almost no grasp of psychology, yet he cannot resist taking charge whenever a pal needs romantic assistance. His running battle with Jeeves over who really solves these problems is the engine of the comedy, especially once Bertie dismisses his valet's methods as obsolete. His confident, catastrophically wrong schemes set the plot in motion and keep the reader rooting for the man who means well and understands nothing.

Jeeves

Jeeves observes his employer's tangled love affairs with the calm of a man who has already calculated three moves ahead, offering advice in the mildest possible tone. When Bertie dismisses him as out of form and takes over personally, the valet's patient faith in psychology, costume, and timing becomes the story's hidden architecture. His schemes, however eccentric, prove the only reliable force in a house full of people determined to ruin their own romances.

Gussie Fink-Nottle

Gussie arrives at Brinkley Court disguised, miserable, and hopelessly in love with Madeline Bassett, a girl who regards him as a joke. His terror of proposing is matched only by his devotion to newts, and Bertie's conviction that strong drink and forceful methods will cure him drives some of the book's finest comedy. His paralysis is the central romantic knot the entire household is trying, and failing, to untie.

Aunt Dahlia

Aunt Dahlia presides over Brinkley Court with a hunter's energy, juggling a failing magazine, a furious husband, and a house full of guests whose romances are all collapsing at once. Her exasperation with Bertie is matched only by her willingness to enlist him, and her running battle with Uncle Tom over money gives the country scenes their anxious undertow. She matters because Brinkley is her stage, and every scheme Bertie concocts must survive her scrutiny.

Tuppy Glossop

Tuppy and Angela have quarreled, and his refusal to grovel first has left both of them miserable and too stubborn to reconcile. He is genuinely devoted to food, a fact he hotly denies, which makes Bertie's advice that he push away a dinner cooked by Anatole both hilarious and agonizing. His standoff with Angela gives the Brinkley scenes their romantic counterpoint and tests Bertie's talent for well-meant interference.

Angela

Angela loves Tuppy still, but she will not be the one to yield, and her wrinkled nose and cold looks reduce him to elaborate schemes of indirect apology. She is sharp, proud, and entirely her mother's daughter, which makes her a formidable opponent in any domestic negotiation. Her estrangement from Tuppy is one of the romantic tangles Bertie is determined to resolve, with predictably mixed results.